Operating the largest
Guarantees of Origin
registry in Europe
Guarantees of Origin
registry in Europe
The Norwegian Energy Certificate System (NECS) is a registry for issuing and tracking green energy certificates - European Guarantees of Origin and Norwegian-Swedish Elcertificates. It has been delivered by Unicorn Systems for Statnett as an implementation of the Certigy product. The goal was to provide Statnett customers with the best-in-class user experience and flexibility with outstanding performance and security, both via human user interface as well as via modern and easy-to-use API for machine-to-machine integration.
Transmission system operator in the Norwegian energy system
Statnett is a state enterprise owned by the Norwegian state through the Ministry of Petroleum and Energy. Statnett’s mission is securing power supply through operations, monitoring and preparedness, facilitating the realisation of Norway's climate objectives, and facilitating creation of value for our customers and the society in general.
Statnett is also the national issuing body for energy certificates and founding member of the Association of Issuing Bodies. Thanks to the prevailing electricity production from renewable sources in Norway (98% from hydroelectric plants) there is more than 140 TWh of green energy certified a year, which represents around 20% of all energy certified in Europe and therefore makes Statnett registry the largest in Europe.
Before the project
Before the new NECS was delivered to Statnett, there were a few drawbacks of the preceding solution. First of them was the slowness of the application both on the user screens (where some operations took more then ten minutes to complete), as well as on the backend processes.
For instance the certificate issuing, which is one of the key regular business processes of each registry, was a tedious process requiring even an outage for several hours.
Furthermore, from user perspective the solution was not flexible and not user friendly. The screens provided only fixed, pre-configured views on the data without any flexibility for the user and complex filters must have been set every time the user entered a screen.
Due to the used technologies the solution looked outdated and was not capable of providing any modern integration capabilities.
Fast and reliable
Best-in-class user experience and flexibility simplify the daily tasks of the end users and, therefore, require less involvement of Statnett resources. We help significantly save end users' time so they can focus on their business and not spend time using the system.
Support for multiple certificate schemes enables parallel operation of European Guarantees of Origin and Norwegian-Swedish Elcertificates and is easily extensible to other certificate types, like gas, heat and cooling, in the future.
SaaS delivery saves Statnett money otherwise spent on infrastructure and decreases its operational, administration and maintenance costs.
Benefits
Functionality, flexibility, and performance
The project's outcome is a modern certificate registry, providing Statnett customers with an up-to-date responsive GUI with full flexibility for the end-users. Users can freely and easily customize screens by adding or removing columns they want to see, changing the order of the columns, and sorting and filtering. The custom changes can be stored as save views, which can then be quickly switched and/or shared with other users.
User access is enabled by simple login (optionally with multifactor authentication), but yet securely preventing any unauthorized access to customer data. Thanks to the micro-service architecture, the particular functionalities can be scaled as needed, not influencing each other. Therefore, the above-mentioned lengthy certificate issuing now takes no longer than 20 minutes during the regular daily operation, without users even noticing its execution. The REST API offered by the system is easy to use and allows the customers to simply integrate the functions of NECS into their environments and automate them.
Solution serves our customers' needs
NECS is a certificate management system for issuing and tracking of Guarantees of Origin for commodities. It is a flexible solution supporting multiple certificate schemes, covering the whole certificate lifecycle starting from issuing, transfers, exports, and imports up to the cancellation.
It is built using Unicorn Application Framework - a platform for developing cloud-ready mobile-first applications and information systems with rich user interface, based primarily on modern web technologies.
It utilizes micro-service architecture and therefore the overall solution has been divided into several sub-applications - User Interface (GUI), Certificates, Transparency, Integrations and APIs, Transactions, Metered Data, Finance and Master Data.
NECS is provided as solution-as-a-service (SaaS), deployed and operated in the Unicorn cloud.
NECS has been developed in cooperation with Statnett as an implementation of Unicorn standard Certigy product, see more on Certigy.
Director of Market Operations in Statnett
